In response to these revelations, Claire Fox spoke on the telephone yesterday to Colin Parry, whose 12-year-old son Tim Parry was murdered alongside 3-year-old Johnathan Ball by the IRA in their infamous 1993 bombing of Warrington.

Yet again Claire Fox refused to dissociate herself from her previous statements supporting IRA terrorism: Mr Parry wrote – “the fact that she repeatedly refused to disavow her comments supporting the IRA bombing which took Tim’s and Johnathan’s young lives proves she hasn’t changed her original views.”

Johnathan Ball and Tim Parry, victims of the IRA bomb in Warrington, 1993

The Claire Fox scandal raises a serious question mark over Nigel Farage’s judgment in selecting an apologist for IRA terrorism to stand for the European Parliament representing his new party. It remains to be seen whether North West voters will desert the Brexit Party over this issue – if so the beneficiaries could be the English Democrats, UKIP, or independent candidate Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, alias Tommy Robinson.

This was the classic tome Imperialism by J.A. Hobson, well known to all serious students of British politics but apparently new to many Fleet Street scribblers.

Hobson was among the most prominent critics of the British Empire’s war in South Africa – the Boer War – in which among other outrages the British Empire pioneered the use of concentration camps to intern Boer civilians.

In the build-up to the war prominent Jewish financiers plotted with the gentile and Rothschild ally Cecil Rhodes to stage a “false flag” incident known to history as the Jameson Raid. This conspiracy failed, but it was not long before some of the same characters had successfully provoked a brutal war. There were almost 50,000 civilian casualties, including more than 26,000 Boer civilian women and children killed in British concentration camps.

Alfred Beit, one of the Jewish tycoons who plotted the Jameson Raid

Before, during and after the conflict, several leading opponents of the war – ranging from Marxists to Labour Party founders to Liberals – explicitly denounced what they saw as the Jewish influence in provoking and sustaining the conflict.

British Marxist (and first-class cricketer) Henry Hyndman attacked Jewish newspaper owners as “poisoners of the wells of public information”; he went on to condemn “this shameful attempt of a sordid capitalism to drag us into a policy of conquest in tropical regions which can benefit no living Englishman in the long run, though it may swell the overgrown fortunes of the meanest creatures on the earth”.

After the failure of the Jameson Raid, Liberal MP and journalist Henry Labouchère wrote of the plotters arrested by Boer leaders: “Many of the prisoners bear English names but are nonetheless mostly of foreign Hebrew origin, the kind of people frequently having a penchant to Anglicise their names”.

British Marxist and anti-war activist H.M. Hyndman

Socialist journalist Harry Quelch (later a friend of Lenin) wrote: “The Jew financier is the personfication of that gold international which today dominates the government and the jingo press of all countries.” Quelch later added: “We have denounced this as a Jew-Capitalist war, and seeing the prominent part Jew-capitalists have taken in the Johannesburg agitation, and seeing their intimate relations with Cabinet ministers here at home and the vituperative fury of their organs in the press, we consider the terms fully justified.”

In September 1899 the radical editor of Reynolds’s Newsapaper, W.M. Thompson, wrote: “The Transvaal policy of the present government is undoubtedly controlled by Jews so that England too is passing under the dominion of the foreigners from the East.”

Labour Party founder Keir Hardie concluded in 1900: “Modern imperialism is really run by half a dozen financial houses, many of them Jewish, to whom politics is a counter in the game of buying and selling securities.”

Even David Lloyd George (who as Prime Minister seventeen years later was to preside over the first official British backing for a Zionist homeland in Palestine) denounced the Tory government’s Boer War policies, sarcastically noting that “all our righteousness, all our hatred of wrongs was reserved for a community of Jews six thousand miles away in Johannesburg who ran away when the fighting came for their own cause.”

Labour Party founder Keir Hardie was among the many pioneer socialists who took an anti-Jewish line

One of the most explicitly “anti-semitic” interventions by an opponent of the war was a speech by trade unionist and MP John Burns in February 1900. Burns told the House of Commons: “Wherever we examine, there is the financial Jew, operating, directing, inspiring the agonies that have led to this war. …The trail of the financial serpent is over this war from beginning to end.”

Partly inspired by Burns, the Trade Union Congress passed a resolution at its conference in September 1900 opposing the Boer War as having been waged “to secure the gold fields of South Africa for cosmopolitan Jews most of whom had no patriotism and no country”.

So the author at the centre of the latest Corbyn controversy – J.A. Hobson – was by no means out of line with the prevailing anti-Jewish sentiments of Boer War opponents. He had first been sent to South Africa to report on the brewing conflict by the liberal Manchester Guardian in 1899, and a year later his Guardian journalism was collected into a book. Writing to Guardian proprietor and editor C.P. Scott, Hobson described how he had begun to perceive the Jewish role in South African events: “Many of these men have taken English names, and the extent of the Jew power is thus concealed. I am not exaggerating one whit. I think I can prove it.”

J.A. Hobson

Hobson continued in his letter to Scott (whose family trust still owns today’s Guardian newspaper): “They fastened on the Rand …as they are prepared to fasten upon any other spot on the globe in order to exploit it for the attainment of huge profits and quick return. This small confederacy of international financiers …chiefly foreign Jews, are the economic rulers of South Africa.”

Unlike those who have so keenly jumped on the bandwagon to atack Corbyn for publishing a Foreword praising the “anti-semite” Hobson, H&D actually knows a bit about British imperial history, including the Boer War. The question should not be whether Corbyn, Hobson and others are anti-Jewish. The question should be: are they telling the truth?

Claire Fox is now best known to BBC Radio 4 listeners for her regular role as a panellist on discussion show The Moral Maze, but during the 1980s and 1990s she was a leading member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), having previously been in its Trotskyist rival the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

The RCP had an especially close connection to violent Irish republicans, and ran a front organisation called the Irish Freedom Movement whose bulletin Irish Freedom was edited by Fiona Fox (Claire Fox’s sister) sometimes using the psudonym Fiona Foster.

Claire Fox’s sister Fiona, editor of pro-IRA magazine Irish Freedom

Immediately after the IRA’s 1993 Warrington bombing that killed 3-year-old Johnathan Ball and 12-year-old Tim Parry, Fox’s Irish Freedom bulletin published an editorial headlined Warrington and After. This sneered at “the ‘peace’ movements whose emergence has been so keenly promoted by the British and Irish media” for “their demonisation of the IRA, their crawling apologies for being born Irish and their promotion of the British state – the most militaristic in all of Western Europe”.

Fox’s organisation proclaimed their first response to Warrington as being “to explain the real cause of the Irish war and target the British authorities as the source of the violence.” In the same edition of Irish Freedom Claire Fox herself, under the alias Claire Foster, denounced media censorship and bias. She condemned “the selective concern to mourn only certain children (those killed by ‘terrorists’).”

This is the woman who now aspires to be the Brexit Party’s MEP for North West England, including Warrington where two of these children were murdered by the IRA monsters consistently idolised by the Fox sisters and their friends!

Johnathan Ball and Tim Parry, victims of the IRA bomb in Warrington, 1993

Nigel Farage has always had a blind spot over Ulster, but his decision to promote Claire Fox as a candidate for the European Parliament is a disgrace. This woman is manifestly unfit for elected office: H&D readers in North West England should vote for anything other than the Brexit Party.

Just days after its launch, Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party has taken the lead in a sensational new YouGov opinion poll, released on April 17th.

Former UKIP leader Farage established the Brexit Party after quitting UKIP due to his successor Gerard Batten having aligned the party with Islam-obsessed characters such as ‘Tommy Robinson’ of the English Defence League.

The new poll surveys voting intentions for the European Parliamentary elections, now due to take place on May 23rd, almost two months after the UK was meant to have left the European Union. Delays to Brexit mean we are obliged to hold these elections, even though in theory our exit from the EU has only been postponed until October 31st.

It shows the Brexit Party on 27% with Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour on 22% and Theresa May’s (theoretically) governing Conservatives on just 15%. The Greens are on 10%, followed by the Liberal Democrats on 9%, UKIP on 7%, and the newly-registered Change UK (a rebranding of the pro-EU Independent Group of MPs) on 6%.

Perhaps the only saving grace for UKIP is that (unlike the Brexit Party) it has candidates in local council elections being held across most of England on May 2nd. Batten’s party badly needs some very impressive results at those elections if it is to avoid being completely overshadowed by its rival.

April 19th update:

Two subsequent polls for the Euro-elections have shown different results – one gives Farage’s party a one-pont lead over Labour, but another gives Labour 33%, well ahead of the Tory and Brexit parties competing for second-place with 17%-18%.

These reflect different polling companies’ methods of allocating the large number of poll respondents who (probably genuinely) say they haven’t yet decided how to vote on May 23rd. But what all the polls are clear about is that Farage’s Brexit Party has already opened up a clear lead over his old party UKIP, which has registered between 5% and 7% in each of the polls published so far.

Despite the Great Brexit Betrayal at Westminster, this year’s local elections bear witness to a vacuum where nationalist (and even eurosceptic) politics used to exist.

Nominations closed this afternoon with polling day on May 2nd, and though many councils have yet to publish their lists of candidates, it seems from H&D‘s early analysis that UKIP and its various splinters have put up smaller slates than expected, though almost everywhere UKIP remains well ahead of its rivals For Britain and Democrats & Veterans.

An exception is Epping Forest, where an efficient For Britain branch directed by former BNP election guru Eddy Butler is fielding two candidates, both of them ex-BNP, compared to one for UKIP. Former BNP councillor Mrs Patricia Richardson in Waltham Abbey Honey Lane and former London mayoral candidate Julian Leppert in Waltham Abbey Paternoster have already carried out extensive leafletting and are among the very few nationalist candidates with any chance of winning this year. Elsewhere in the borough English Democrat leader Robin Tilbrook is contesting his home ward of Chipping Ongar.

Stoke-on-Trent, once a jewel in the BNP crown, now elects its full complement of councillors once every four years, so 2019 should have been an important opportunity for both UKIP and Anne Marie Waters’ For Britain Movement, who presently have their sole councillor here.

Some anti-fascist “experts” had predicted a big slate of For Britain candidates here: in fact there are only three, including incumbent councillor Richard Broughan. Similarly UKIP have just three Stoke candidates.

A more impressive showing for Ms Waters’ party is in Leeds, where they are contesting eight of the 33 vacancies – in three of these they will have no UKIP opponent. UKIP have 16 Leeds candidates, and in Bramley & Stanningley ward voters will have UKIP, For Britain and the English Democrats on their ballot paper!

Another failure is in Burnley, where UKIP is contesting only three of the 15 wards and For Britain none. While racial nationalist parties are conspicuous by their absence from most ballot papers, there is one National Front candidate in Burnley – former BNP organiser Steven Smith, who we are pleased to note will have no UKIP opposition in the Brunshaw ward.

Other NF candidates so far declared include the party’s deputy chairman Jordan Pont in East Ecclesfield ward, Sheffield (where he unfortunately has UKIP opposition); and Chris Jackson in his home ward of Todmorden, Calderdale. Like Steven Smith, Chris has no UKIP opposition. Across Sheffield, UKIP are contesting 22 of the 28 vacancies, while D&V have three candidates, only one of whom has UKIP opposition. In Calderdale there are no UKIP candidates at all, and just one For Britain candidate.

Dr Jim Lewthwaite of the British Democrats

Former councillor Dr Jim Lewthwaite is again contesting Wyke ward, Bradford, for the British Democrats. He has no UKIP or D&V opponent and can expect a creditable result. The British Democrats are also contesting Loughborough Shelthorpe ward in Charnwood, Leicestershire.

Elsewhere in Bradford there are nine UKIP candidates, one from D&V, and none from For Britain, even though the latter’s head office is in the city!

For Britain (like the National Front before them) focused much campaigning energy in Rochdale following various Asian/Muslim scandals, but this has produced nothing electorally: UKIP will contest 16 of the 20 Rochdale wards, For Britain none. Even more startling is the total absence of nationalist/eurosceptic parties in Blackpool, an area that voted 75% for Brexit and where (as in Rochdale) there has been extensive campaigning by a range of anti-Islamist groups. For Britain supporters have talked for some time about targeting Blackpool, but they have not fielded a single candidate, and this year there will be no-one from Blackpool UKIP on the ballot paper either.

A similarly rare example of UKIP progress (at least in terms of candidates) is Oldham, where there is a serious slate of 14 UKIP candidates – though not the full slate of 20 that gullible “anti-fascists” had predicted. In nearby Tameside, UKIP have five candidates, Democrats & Veterans one, and For Britain none; while in Stockport there are six UKIP candidates and none from D&V or FB.

Yet another hopelessly inaccurate prediction by lavishly funded “anti-fascist experts” was in Hartlepool, where UKIP was said to have collapsed in favour of For Britain. In fact For Britain has just one candidate in Hartlepool, compared to three for UKIP, one for Democrats & Veterans, and a profusion of independents.

Thanks to boundary changes the most racially divided borough in England – Blackburn with Darwen – has an all-out election, so as in Stoke this should have been a bonanza year for any party seeking to recover some of the votes once cast for the BNP and the England First Party. Yet UKIP have just four candidates, and For Britain none.

Across the Pennines, UKIP is contesting only five of 21 vacancies in Wakefield; and eight out of 23 in Kirklees.

The English Democrats have staged a mini-revival in Barnsley, perhaps helped by the bold action of their leader Robin Tilbrook in launching a legal action to rescue Brexit. There are six EDs here (for 21 vacancies), compared to just three for UKIP and three from the UKIP splinter group Democrats & Veterans. D&V also have two candidates in Kirklees. Another English Democrat candidate is former NF and BNP activist Mick Sharpe, contesting Ripley & Marehay ward, Amber Valley.

In Sunderland UKIP have managed a full slate of 26 candidates, while For Britain and D&V each have just one. Elsewhere in the North-East the eurosceptic cause is less vigorous: Gateshead has seven UKIP candidates for 22 vacancies. Darlington is one of the very few councils anywhere in England where UKIP (with two candidates) has been overtaken by For Britain (with three). In Cheshire East the former UKIP councillor Brian Silvester (who has been re-elected unopposed as a parish councillor) is the sole For Britain candidate, and there is no-one from UKIP.

Another former nationalist heartland where none of the existing parties is reaping electoral potential is the West Midlands borough of Sandwell. UKIP and For Britain each have just four candidates here for 24 vacancies: the only good news is that only one ward has the parties fighting each other. Next door in Dudley there are fourteen UKIP candidates and none from For Britain.

Among the many former UKIP strongholds where the party has collapsed is Thurrock, where almost the entire former UKIP branch has regrouped as ‘Thurrock Independents’. They will have a full slate of seventeen candidates, while UKIP have only two. Similarly there are only three UKIP candidates this year in Thanet, where they once controlled the council and Nigel Farage once hoped to become an MP. The bulk of Thanet’s UKIP activists now call themselves ‘Thanet Independents’. Like their Thurrock counterparts, they will probably end up in Farage’s new Brexit Party, but this is gearing up to fight European (and perhaps General) elections, not local councils. For Britain has one Thanet candidate – ex-BNP parliamentary candidate Michael Barnbrook.

Veteran nationalist Joe Owens is contesting the Kensington & Fairfield ward of his native Liverpool, without a party description, but can be expected to run a professional campaign. Other nationalist independents include Paul Rudge, a Britain First activist standing in Rowley ward, Sandwell, with the party’s backing but without its name on the ballot paper; and former BNP activist Pete Molloy, standing in the Spennymoor ward of Durham.

During the next two days as councils continue to publish their lists of candidates, H&D will carry out a complete analysis of the nationalist/eurosceptic electoral picture, and of course our next edition will report on the election results and our movement’s prospects for recovery.

So far this year’s local election picture can be summarised as follows: UKIP has collapsed in many former strongholds, rather as the BNP did before its eventual death, while retaining pockets of strength. While his embrace of radical anti-Islamism has contributed to UKIP’s implosion, party leader Gerard Batten has the consolation that this same strategy has probably helped to stifle the For Britain Movement, whose founder Anne Marie Waters had hoped that anti-Islamism would be her party’s unique selling point.

Though failing to make a breakthrough in terms of defections from UKIP and overall candidate numbers, For Britain can reasonably hope to elect one or two councillors – perhaps in Stoke, perhaps in Epping Forest, perhaps in Thanet.

Overall however – while in past years we would have been looking at dozens of racial nationalist councillors, and hundreds of UKIP councillors – this year’s elections are likely merely to confirm the continuing crisis of both nationalism and euroscepticism, despite an obvious public appetite for alternatives to the Westminster charade.

This much-promoted and lavishly-funded ‘centre party’ has two principal characteristics. Its ex-Labour members were prompted to leave Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party primarily because of the latter’s alleged “anti-semitism”; while it’s ex-Tory members quit Theresa May’s Conservative Party mainly because they oppose Brexit.

His father was from the Nigerian Igbo tribal group, but his mother Patricia Milmo is an Anglo-Irish solicitor from a wealthy family. Chuka’s maternal grandfather, Sir Helenus Milmo was a judge who served in the British security and intelligence services during and after the Second World War, where thanks to his prowess as an interrogator he was known as ‘Buster’ Milmo.

Since Chuka is now so keen to smear critics of Israel as “anti-semites”, perhaps he could enlighten us about his grandfather’s views on Jewish terrorism against British soldiers and civilians during 1945 to 1948, and his MI5 colleagues’ experience of combatting this Zionist scourge?

Chuka Umunna’s grandfather Sir Helenus Milmo, who before becoming a postwar judge was a senior MI5 officer: he viewed the Nuremberg trials as a “grandiose performance”.

And since it is illegal in several European countries to criticise the Nuremberg trials of alleged war criminals, perhaps Chuka would care to comment on his grandfather’s view of the entire Nuremberg process?

H&D can reveal that on 11th August 1945 ‘Buster’ Milmo wrote to his immediate superior in the British security service MI5 about a short British list of alleged war criminals for potential trial at Nuremberg: “which names about ten candidates to occupy the stage at this grandiose performance”.

Milmo was not alone in taking a jaundiced or cynical view of the Nuremberg charade of “victors’ justice”. No less a figure than Lord Hankey – the main architect of the modern civil service who served as the first ever Cabinet Secretary from 1916 to 1938 told the House of Lords in 1949 that “Contrary to general belief, the history on which the Nuremberg judgments and findings were based is not accurate.”

Lord Hankey added: “There was something cynical and revolting in the spectacle of British, French and American judges sitting on the Bench with colleagues who, however impeccable as individuals, represented a country which before, during and since the trials has perpetrated half the political crimes in the calendar. And in spite of the specious arguments on page 38 of the Nuremberg Judgment, I do not see how anyone can deny that under a cloak of justice these trials were just the old, old story—one law for the victors and another for the vanquished. Vae victis!”

If Chuka Umunna hopes to refresh British politics and renew the UK’s relationship with Europe, he could start by quoting his own family’s heritage to repair the damage caused by what his grandfather called the “grandiose performance” of Nuremberg. And if he is serious about “anti-semitism”, Mr Umunna should be keen to differentiate between what Lord Hankey termed “specious arguments”, and serious efforts to assess historical truth.

Many of those who voted in 2016’s referendum for the UK to leave the European Union believed that this would lead to a rapid reduction in immigration. A continuing debate ensued for example in the pages of H&D between keen Brexit campaigners (who broadly believed that leaving the EU would be a major blow against the multiracialist establishment) and more sceptical racial nationalists, some of whom feared that Brexit would actually worsen our country’s racial problems.

This week official statistics confirmed the sceptics’ worst fears. It is now apparent that almost from the moment of the 2016 referendum, net immigration from EU countries began to fall. In fact there is net emigration from the UK to the Central and Eastern European nations known as the EU8: i.e. Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

Conservative-dominated governments for the past nine years have consistently stated their aim to reduce annual net immigration to below 100,000. If achieved, that would take us back to the start of the Blair / ‘New Labour’ era in 1997, when net immigration was 50,000.

Don’t forget that even then, there would be tens of thousands more people arriving in the UK than leaving, and these immigrants would be constantly adding to our existing non-British population.

Shockingly, none of those Conservative-led governments since 2010 has got anywhere near even their modest 100,000 immigrant target. The most recent figures for the year ending June 2018 show net immigration of 273,000.

And of these an increasing proportion are non-Europeans. In that same 12 month period, the number of non-EU citizens who are in the UK on a long term basis rose by 248,000, whereas the same figure for EU citizens was 74,000.

Tomorrow’s Daily Mail predictably attacks Jeremy Corbyn for having “lost the plot”, choosing to print a photograph of the Labour leader gardening on his allotment as the storm clouds gathered and seven of his rebellious MPs broke away to form an “Independent Group”.

Their assumption seems to be that it was somehow weird or arrogant for Corbyn to be on his allotment at such a time.

I wonder whether voters will see it that way? They don’t share the obsessions of political journalists and part of Corbyn’s success at the 2017 election was because (despite his ‘extremist’ policies) many Britons saw him as a normal bloke – his allotment and Arsenal allegiances were part of that.

If most voters were concerned about Corbyn’s previous associations with Sinn Fein, or his links with alleged ‘antisemites’, then they would have ditched the Labour Party long ago.

The Jewish Chronicle has long attacked Corbyn for ‘antisemitism’: most voters don’t care

Sadly for Fleet St, and sadly for many H&D readers, most Labour voters are probably more concerned about the effects of Tory austerity cuts than they are about terrorism in Northern Ireland, arguments about Zionism and ‘antisemitism’, or even Britain’s membership of the EU.

That’s why when in 2017 Theresa May offered them the opportunity to elect a House of Commons committed to securing Brexit, the voters instead returned the present hung parliament.

Doubtless the latest split will do some electoral damage to Labour, but a great deal might depend on whether the Tories also split, and especially on whether really heavyweight Tories can be persuaded to join the breakaway.

Latest rumours are that a gang of four female Tory MPs are most likely to defect: Anna Soubry (who has already removed references to the Conservative Party from her Twitter biography), Dr Sarah Wollaston, former cabinet minister Justine Greening, and Heidi Allen.

Perhaps a bigger prize would be Sir Alan Duncan, who is still in Theresa May’s government as a Foreign Office Minister of State responsible for Europe and the Americas. Whereas some of the defectors are pretty much in the ‘wet’ Tory Reform Group (TRG) tradition, Alan Duncan was closely associated with William Hague and in his student days was a leading figure in the so-called ‘Magdalen machine’, the main ‘right-wing’ rival to TRG inside the Oxford University Conservative Association.

In this respect Sir Alan would make an unusual ally for the solidly pro-Zionist Labour faction who have created the ‘Independent Group’. However it’s possible these hardcore Zionists might welcome him for this very reason, as it would help to deflect suspicions that the whole business is a Mossad plot to prevent a Corbyn premiership!

This morning the long-expected split began in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Seven MPs resigned and will now sit as an ‘Independent Group’ in the House of Commons.

The group includes one relic of the 1990s New Labour project, Stockport MP Ann Coffey who was Tony Blair’s parliamentary private secretary. However another is Chris Leslie, MP for Nottingham East, who during New Labour’s civil war was a supporter of Gordon Brown rather than Blair, and is married to one of Brown’s former aides.

Two others are among the most strongly pro-Zionist MPs in Parliament: Luciana Berger, Jewish MP for Liverpool Wavertree, and Mike Gapes, who though not Jewish himself is best known for his five years as a very pro-Zionist chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.

It seems likely that some of Corbyn’s other Jewish critics have deliberately avoided joining the rebel group because they didn’t want it to be perceived as disproportionately Jewish. If significant numbers join the seven initial members, one would expect them eventually to include Dame Margaret Hodge and Dame Louise Ellman, though the latter has tweeted that she will continue to “fight the virus of antisemitism in the Labour Party from within”.

For the time being the “Independent Group” will not be a registered political party and will not fight elections. This avoids them having to contest the forthcoming local elections in May, where they would doubtless be crushed.

Chuka Umunna, effective leader of the Independent Group and once seen as a future Labour Prime Minister – has he committed political suicide?

Yet the intellectual leader of the group, half-Nigerian MP for Streatham, Chuka Umunna, has strongly implied that he sees the group evolving into a new “centrist” party. Umunna is a former City lawyer whose maternal grandfather, Sir Helenus ‘Buster’ Milmo, was the leading MI5 interrogator during the Second World War before becoming a High Court judge.

Westminster has been rife with rumours for the last fortnight that Umunna was about to launch such a party alongside Anna Soubry and other fanatically pro-EU Conservatives. Perhaps these rebel Tories have been put off by the undoubted practical difficulties of launching a new party, but if Theresa May does eventually position the Conservative Party as unequivocally pro-Brexit, or if she is replaced by a Brexiteer such as Boris Johnson, we can assume Ms Soubry and a few others will team up with Mr Umunna.

According to an email circular this morning from Stephen Bush, the well-connected political editor of the New Statesman, it was Gavin Shuker, MP for Luton South, who helped persuade the other six that it was time for a formal split. Mr Shuker is an unusual character, who in one respect has nothing in common with New Labour ‘centrism’. Before standing for parliament in 2010 he was leader and pastor of the City Life Church in Luton: he opposes ‘gay marriage’ and has taken a number of other stances on ‘moral questions’ that put him at odds with the liberal consensus.

Gavin Shuker, the former Christian pastor who registered the limited company behind the new ‘Independent Group’ of MPs

One of the Labour rebels, Angela Smith, MP for the marginal Yorkshire seat Penistone & Stocksbridge, made much of her working-class roots (in contrast to the well-heeled Umunna). But a problem for such people is that while working-class Britons might find their traditional Labour loyalties strained by Corbyn’s trendy-left, London-dominated Momentum faction, many such voters (including in Ms Smith’s own constituency) voted to leave the EU and remain pro-Brexit.

Umunna’s “independents” have made it clear that being pro-EU and campaigning for a second referendum to overturn the 2016 result is a fundamental component of their so-called ‘centrism’.

That’s why the best known earlier anti-Corbyn rebel, Birkenhead MP Frank Field who quit Labour to sit as an independent last August, will certainly not be joining Umunna’s group. Similarly other anti-Corbyn MPs who might be thought on the right of Labour – Kate Hoey, Graham Stringer and John Mann – will certainly not be on board.

In fact one might logically expect two Independent Groups to the right of Corbyn’s Labour – one pro-Brexit and one pro-Remain!

If this really is the long-overdue breakup of the two-party stranglehold on British politics, one eventual consequence will have to be a change in the electoral system.

Only then will we see a realistic chance for the views of forgotten millions of British voters to be represented at Westminster, and a real challenge to the dead consensus of multiracialism.

The precise nature of her relationship with Wilson remained a mystery, and as late as 2007 she sued the BBC for claims in a drama-documentary that she and the PM had been lovers.

Most notoriously she was held responsible for the inclusion of several disreputable businessmen in Wilson’s final honours list at the time of his resignation in 1976. This became known as the “lavender list” because it was drawn up on Falkender’s personal notepaper.

Almost all of the disreputable names on this list were wealthy Jews, but Falkender’s obituaries this weekend delicately avoided the subject of Jews and Israel – even though during the 1970s this connection was so notorious that satirical magazine Private Eye labelled Falkender “the Zionic woman”.

Heritage and Destiny readers will learn much more later this year about the web of Zionist connections in Harold Wilson’s Downing Street – a web of organised crime, money laundering and (eventually) murder.